November 2018 Startup Update: Month 1

Month 1: Lazer-like focused on writing code and talking to users. After Elisa and I split up from doing giftlab.io, I decided to focus on soapdictate after I’d left swissnexSF. soapdictate is my other side-project, and I wanted to see if I could make it work. I left swissnexSF October 31st 2018 and switched to working on the soapdictate dictation app full-time.

Week 1

• quickly followed up with all contacts from job to let them know what i’m working on incorporated LLC with stripe atlas (more like aside project currently but don’t want liability), Did health insurance, worked from friends’ office.
• built subscription, built 60-sec dictation.

Week 2

• Spent weekend and Monday with a friend doctor and original user to learn more and think of features.
• In dedicated office – spacious.com
• Asking for intros to physicians.
• First subscriber! Emailed the hell out of her. Ran the friends’ feature by her on Friday – creating a billable PDF note. She liked so building it.

Week 3

• Really hitting stride. Work from spacious (gets me out of home for $129/mo). Talking to Users and Writing code.
• Asking for intros to physicians.
• Shipped first differentiated version Monday (dictate / create PDF billable note)
• Sales slow though. Grind. Emailing users, writing features for them.
• Enough physician interviews that know not physicians (process of elimination). My one paying customer is acupuncturist – maybe that’s it. Talking to dentists and psychotherapists too.

Week 4

• New sign-ups stopped. User week necessary.
• Physicially going to acupuncturists and signing them up.
• Asking for intros to acupuncturists, psychotherapists and dentists.
• Applied to YC and Emergent Ventures spontaneously – past deadline but we’ll see!
• Second sign-up! Now 2 paying users.
• Michael (Mentor) recommended I start fundraising with proto + users.

Summary

My blurb for month 1 as sent to a friend:

A few months ago I wrote a medical dictation app called soapdictate to help my friend at Stanford Med save time on his charting, as Stanford Med only provided Dragon Desktop and so the physicians were all using pretty outdated hacks off the app store. Turns out, Apple’s Speech Recognition API has hit a level where it can get most notes done for him, and this MVPs been selling consistently on the app store ever since. I just switched full-time and am looking to learn more about the problems physicians face, and add new features like templates/EHR integration/commands etc – hopefully to help reduce the clerical burden on physicians in the mid-term.